Comfort and speed
A New Yorker’s Maine-built tuna boat has it all
Anthony Siniscalchi fishes for tuna out of Atlantic Beach, N.Y. He runs 100 miles or more out to
the offshore canyons - Hudson, Tom’s, Atlantic, Fish Tails - chasing bigeye, yellowfin and bluefin.
Like many of the tuna fishermen in his area, Siniscalchi has typically gone south - New Jersey,
North Carolina, Florida - to have boats built.
But when Siniscalchi, who has owned a 55-foot Ocean, a sportfishing design built in New Jersey,
and more recently a center-console, 35-foot, 40-mph, deep-v Intrepid built in Dania, Fla.,
pondered his next boat, he decided he wanted something more than a day boat, which the Intrepid
is, but not as much as the Ocean, which he felt was too much boat to fish by himself. Perhaps
because he’d once owned a 40-foot Young Brothers, built in corea, Maine, he started thinking
about the few Maine-built boats that fished out of his area.
Three of them had been built or finished off at Otis Enterprises Marine in Searsport. “One of
them was 10 years old and it looked like new,” Siniscalchi says. After weighing his options,
Siniscalchi ended up going Down East for his new boat. Indeed, he wound up at Downeast Boats
and Composites in Penobscot, Maine, manufacturer of the Northern Bay 38. He bought a hull
and had it trucked to Otis Enterprises Marine, 45 minutes away, to be finished off.
That was a little more than two years ago. Early this June, he stood on the Searsport town dock,
totally enamored of the finished boat. “Just look at it,” he said. “When those guys that go to
North Carolina to build their boats see this boat, they’ll be coming to Maine.
“The boat is just as nice as a Buddy Davis” - a high-end sportfisherman built in Wanchese, N.C. -
“or other boats built in North Carolina. Its just as fast as them, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to
build in Maine than North Carolina. This has all the comforts of my Ocean, except the Ocean was
a million-and-a-half dollars. This boat is nowhere near that.”
when the 38-foot Emme left the dock that June day for its first sea trials, the sound of the 670-hp
Cummins QSM11, bolted to a ZF marine gear with a 1.75:1 ratio turning a 28" x 32", four-bladed
prop, was fairly quiet in the main cabin: the engine compartment is enclosed by 2-inch
polyethylene QL foam (made from recycled materials).
Travis Otis, who along with his dad, Keith, built the boat, says that one container of five sheets or
29" x 40" QL foam, equals the weight of one 4' x 4' sheet of lead foam. “You get almost double
the square footage,” he notes.
That’s another way of saying that saving weight is important in a tuna boat and certainly was
important in building the Emme, because less weight leads to a faster boat and better fuel
consumption. Running out of Searsport Harbor and down Penobscot Bay towards Belfast Harbor
and then back towards Sears Island, the Emme topped out at 35 mph (30.4 knots). Travis later
put her cruising speed at 30 mph (26 knots), where she burned 24 gallons per hour at 2,000 rpm.
When they started building the boat, Travis says, they hoped for a maximum of 30 mph. “We
were quite pleased with this speed.”
Likely providing a bit of the boat’s speed are the one-piece lifting strakes going from the bow to
the transom. “You get lift from them immediately, and it has worked for us on our racing boat,”
Keith says.
Another way weight was reduced in building the Emme was by using a core material in the decks
and cabin manufactured by Tricel Honeycomb. The cored panels consist of honeycombed
phenolicresin-impregnated Kraft paper made up of triangular cells between two thin facing
surfaces of okoumé (the tree from which most marine plywood comes) plywood.
Tricel Honeycomb literature says this creates an I-beam-like structure that carries shear, bending
and compressive loads. Since the core area is comprised of a type of paper and is 95 percent
open space, there’s a big weight savings over a solid material.
Travis says a ¾-inch sheet of plywood weights 60 pounds, whereas a ¾-sheet of Tricel
Honeycomb is 18 to 21 pounds. Because the core material is paper and there’s a lot of air space
in the core, another advantage to the material is that if it should get wet, “it will dry out in a
matter of days,” Travis says.
This is the first time Otis Enterprises Marine has used the material, and Keith says he isn’t aware
of it being used by other Maine shops that build commercial fishing boats. If there’s a downside
to the material it’s the cost, which is about three times that of plywood and fiberglass. But, as
Travis notes, because of the weight savings, “You won’t be using as much fuel, and over time
you’ll get [the money] back and possibly more.”
Enter the main cabin and wheelhouse, and the first thing that catches your eye is the navigation
station - and that’s by design. “We wanted something as the focal point to the boat, that would
captivate everyone that enters,” Travis says.
Part of the reason for the eye-catching appeal of the navigation station is the Tricel Honeycomb
material. The material bends relatively easily, so the builder isn’t restricted to building a structure
with squared, or nearly so, corner, but can create something that flows from one rounded corner
to another.
The core’s veneer is coated with a custom stain so that the wood resembles a light mahogany,
which contrasts nicely with the cabin’s carpeting, the white gelcoast overhead and the white Tracy
International helm seat. The top of the navigation station is made from a black, heavy-duty
polyurethane surfacing compound that was finished off with three coats of an automotive clear
coating. “The clear coating gives it depth,” explains Travis.
On the left-hand side of the navigation station is a polished stainless steel tube running up to the
overhead. It provides a nice visual touch, something to hold onto in a seaway and a means of
hiding the wires from the outside radio and Furuno radar antennas, as well as the KVH
TracVision M3 Satellite TV antenna.
There are two TVs, one that folds down from the overhead in the main cabin and another at the
foot of the bunks in the fo’c’sle.
The fo’c’sle companionway is done differently than on most fishing boats with their straight,
rather cramped stairs.
On the Emme the way down is curved. The Tricel paneling allowed for a wide radius on the
inboard side of the stairs. Thus the steps can be wider than normal. “That makes it easier to enter
and exit from down below, especially when you are carrying something, when the boat is rolling,”
Travis says.
Behind the steps is space for a cabin heater and hot-water heater.
The stairs are carpeted as in the fo’c’sle and the main cabin. Though beneath the carpeting in the
main cabin is medium-density foam with a ?-inch layer of vinyl between the foam and carpeting.
That helps cut down on the engine noise and gives a cushioning effect, which should be easier on
the crew’s legs.
Besides the Tv and carpeting, the Emme carries a few other amenities and Siniscalchi doesn’t
apologize for any of them. “I’m 67 years old. I want carpets. I want air conditioning. I want
TV. I want a refrigerator. I want a shower and hot and cold running water. I want all the
comforts of my 55-foot sportfisherman, but in a 38-foot boat that if I want to go fishing by
myself, I can,” he says.
But when tuna are around, you won’t find Siniscalchi or his crew sitting around the TVs watching
Judge Judy. Siniscalchi figures he can catch as many tuna as the next boat and maybe more, and
he’s depending on the green stick mounted against the back of the pilothouse to accomplish that.
Siniscalchi has been a rod-and-reel tuna fisherman; this is the first time he’s used a green stick,
which was developed by the Japanese. The green stick on the Emme is a 45-foot fiberglass pole,
weighing 110 pounds and costing $10,000.
There’s normally a heavy line running from the top of the green stick to its own retrieval line and
then to a cotton breakaway line. On the breakaway line’s outboard side is a high-test
monofilament mainline that goes down to the boat and then stretches back several hundred feet
behind the boat with at least five lines dangling down to artificial squid lures that just hit the
water’s surface. Keeping the leaders out of the water removes the artificial look of the lures to
the tuna, Siniscalchi says.
At the end of the mainline is a three or four-foot “bird” shaped like a porpoise that keeps the line
taut, and behind the bird is a float, just in case the bird - which costs $200 or so - should break
loose from the mainline and sink.
When a tuna takes one of the lures, the force of the hit snaps the breakaway line, and a small
winch hauls in the mainline until the tuna can be removed. On Siniscalchi’s boat, the winch is a
bandit reel mounted on the starboard-stern quarter.
But Siniscalchi is going to modify the rig. He will set up the lines with the lures with a breakaway
clip and have a line running rom a fishing rod to each lure. When a tuna hits the lure, the lure will
be separated from the mainline, leaving the other lures fishing, while the tuna is reeled in.
If that setup doesn’t work, Siniscalchi says he will go back to using the bandit reel to bring in the
entire mainline. There is also a 21-foot outrigger on each side of the boat to run lines from.
The green stick only works when the boat is moving through the water at about 5 to 7 knots. For
night fishing when the Emme is drifting or anchored, Siniscalchi had four underwater lights built
into the bottom of the hull, two beneath the transom and two just forward of that. Turn the lights
on at night and they will attract bait fish, which, as Siniscalchi notes, “will attract the big fish,” to
be caught with rod and reel.
Large fish, whether caught with rod and reel or the green stick, will be hauled through a door on
the transom by a line that runs through the block and down to a hauler on the backside of the
wheelhouse.
Siniscalchi calls tuna fishing serious fishing, but when he got the Emme to Atlantic Beach, tuna
wouldn’t be running so he said he’d be doing - possible by himself - “some local fishing for sea
bass, striped bass. I don’t do it commercially. I do it for pleasure.” And it helps that he has a
boat that lets him combine work and pleasure.
Article originally published in National Fisherman, September 2007